LAHORE: A major power breakdown at Tarbela dam on Wednesday morning plunged several cities of Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan.
Following the technical fault at Tarbela, gross production of electricity plunged to 12000 megawatts and work has started for power restoration has been initiated.
Till latest reports, electricity was said to have been fully been reinstated in Multan and 80 percent of Islamabad, as per the power division.
According to Power Division Secretary, the sudden blackout impacted several cities across the country including Lahore, Multan, Bahawalpur in Punjab.
Sources revealed airlines offices, baggage handling and the Airport Security Force base camp, amongst other areas, were without electricity.
In Lahore, the Punjab Assembly proceedings were also suspended due to the technical fault at Tarbela, with opposition members chanting slogans against the government for its inability to fix the country’s power system.
And Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s provincial capital Peshawar, Swat and Lakki Marwat were the areas impacted by the technical fault at Tarbela.
Also, the capital city Islamabad was impacted by the power breakdown at Tarbela as Minister for Power Division Awais Ahmed Khan Leghari said power is being reinstated after various power plants tripped off in several provinces.
Power Division secretary along with the appropriate teams have reached the site to fix the fault. Although, no proper timeline has been given as to when the repairs are expected to finish.
As per a spokesperson for power division, the power stations remained shut due to the fault, leaving a major part of the country without power.
He said that Mangla, Ghazi Barotha, Tarbela have been connected with the national grid.
Earlier breakdowns at the power plant had seen the repairs take up to seven to eight hours.
Furthermore, a spokesperson of the Atomic Energy Commission said that the tripping of lines from the Tarbela plant caused all four Chashma Nuclear Power Plants to trip as well.
Power demand across the country is said to be hovering around 20,000 megawatts.
As new setup will come, it is high time to revisit our National Grid framework, it is not working, new plants closer to demand centers have been commissioned and major rethink is needed to;
1. Reduce Transmission losses and costs of NTDC.
2. Improvise to match supply and demand at demand centres in cost effective manner.
3. Reduce unnecessary high investment costs to keep existing National Grid system continuing, power lines addition or upgradation is costly and we are following a lavish method. Upgrade everything.
4. 132 KV lines, 66 KV, 33 KV lines from DISCOs be taken and handover to NTDC. Losses on these lines are not high, nor lot of HR is needed, currently 15% HR of DISCOs on STGs, but management focus and investment above 80%. DISCOs shd only look at 11kv feeders.
NTDC losses, shd not be above 3 %- improvise to meet that upper limit. Cost of generation is high, even small saving of loss % coverts into huge financial volumes.
STG system of DISCOs got funds from ADB, WB, PSDP, etc etc. It is good effort to keep costly equipment safe and reliable but pulls away focus of investments and management time and effort, result is neglected Distribution assets – feeders,DT transformers, HT, LT, massive HR …..
STG of DISCOs must be taken away and hand over to NTDC. This will improve energy accounting and losses to maximum.
STG function of our DISCOs is in unnecessary steps also. 132 kv down to 11kv. LESCO invested to reduce 132kv to 11 kv in one step… good effort, others have also done. Still we saw disconnect yesterday, as NTDC lines restored bit grids took time.
This also necessitate hand over STG to NTDC, which will also help in standardisation of equipment, safe and reliable grid ops, most importantly Automation.
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